I am interested in international relations, images of adorable animals I'm allergic to, excessively mainstream science fiction and fantasy, legal reform, and so many more things than will fit within the character limit I've been provided here.
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Suffice to say that "but I already watched it at Mommy's last month!!" availed you absolutely nothing in my father's home. The first R *he* let me watch was "Outbreak", and in that case I'm pretty sure my stepmom intervened. Plus it wasn't R for sex or even interpersonal violence, really.
RoboCop rented from the video store; I was probably 6? My dad's position on content was "I'm blocking Nickelodeon because the Rugrats are disrespectful" and my stepdad's position was "it's funny when children are so scared they pee themselves" so one guess as to who invited me to stay up for that.
I thought I was doing pretty well on this but I didn't think I had full compliance. On the other hand this is definitely not looking through every single post, because I have definitely posted a lot more than 556 times. That feels like the last 90 days or something.
Ohio sees too much of him; we depend on all the other states to pitch in from time to time. (Though in the years between graduating from Ohio State and running for Senate he did a credible job of not being here, he made up for it during the campaign.)
"Arn"? I've spotted that in rural Ohio several times, never been sure where it came from. There are some seriously wacky deviations in pronunciation in this state that don't show up in Kentucky, utterly wrecking my initial "blame the South" thesis.
There was a school shooting (at a high school) a couple of minutes after Kirk was shot; I'm guessing that might be more relevant to the age group.
I've been in the hospital for most of this week and overhearing a *lot* of conversations, and so far nobody's mentioned it.
"Killing people, yes including the terrible ones and the ones you think are useless, and yeah that random potential exception you're about to bring up, too, is both morally wrong and a tactical/strategic mistake" continues to pay off as a sustainable political position.
In fairness, you're talking about Tim Ballard.
(Also the Sprite and the bread and the gravy each have more sodium than one flipping salt packet. You're just taking away choices from people who are already being infantilized past the breaking point.)
I recognize that being able to complain about the cardiac diet instead of the clear liquid diet is a huge blessing, but the consistently arbitrary and counterproductive food decisions in a setting where it's a miracle if I can actually consume 900 calories in a day remains worthy of criticism.
Also the fact the "cardiac diet" allows coffee and full-fat gravy and processed white bread and Sprite makes the absolute exclusion of Coca-Cola seem pretty arbitrary. It can't be the sugar, the carbonation, or the caffeine!
That's counting paid personnel I've discussed this with, not individual conversations, because it would be impossible to count how many separate times I've said "I don't drink coffee"/"I don't want the coffee"/"don't bother with the coffee" at this point. It usually takes days.
I still think living in a place where you're part of the overwhelming ethnic and religious majority is not healthy, but there are upsides to being in a place where you can say "I'm a Mormon" and they automatically take coffee/tea off the hospital menu. I'm up to four - maybe five - attempts here.
The dog discourse eventually escalated to the point I'm pretty sure the sheriff came around, but as far as I can tell law enforcement puts those things on FB because of actual calls for service about kids knocking on doors. I decided I don't even want to know how many calls like that they get.
They had to try a couple of different vomiting drugs on me to find one that, itself, didn't produce vomiting, and as a result I think I just got the best sleep physically possible in a hospital setting, medically induced comas *not* excluded, yay first-hand experience.
The cops out here do Facebook announcements saying "such-and-such child is here on a semester exchange program and has a solicitation permit [shown in photo], her trying to sell you nuts for the high school band does NOT constitute an emergency". It helps.
Around here it's generally "if your dog poops on my lawn again I'm getting my .22 and I don't care who dies" and "highly suspicious young people with an excess of melanin, undoubtedly here from the big city to steal our cars and sell our babies drugs, now playing basketball in the village park".
One of the relatively few photos like this my brain has actually stored pretty well, because it has DeForest Kelly (next to Mr. Cruise) and Leonard Nimoy, with Harrison Ford [Witness, I think]. Mixing the streams and all that. (Also various Cheers cast members and whatnot.)
It's never anything fun.
Like that whole sepsis "overwhelming sense of pending doom" thing, or the "I'm pretty sure this is actually a really serious breathing problem and I may be close to dying" one, and "wow that pressure ulcer looks super infected" and "I'm definitely going to pass out if they do this draw."
Also I got down an additional 16.9oz of water, about five ounces of Ensure, and two whole entire nibbles of plain bagel before it all came up, and the main reason I didn't do a vicious "I told you so" dance is that I was pretty close to passing out. I hate being right in hospitals.
So I don't know if this counts as dirty pool or entirely appropriate self-advocacy, but after the ER discharged me on the grounds I'd kept about 12oz of water down for twenty minutes, I went to the cafeteria and tried eating something. Am currently in triage again, dying of not-surprised.
Yep, but he was too young for preschool when Clinton/Bush 2.0/Trump were born, so it kind of needs an asterisk. He has no more memories of the war or FDR than any older Boomer - he experienced the consumer boom and birth of television and Sputnik and school nuclear drills the same way they did.
Having worked for a couple of C-suite types this, along with them being complete suckers for the least bit of transparently false flattery, is completely unsurprising. The only one that wasn't was an academic who hated most of the trappings but was good at managing complex systems in turmoil.
Also one of my first coherent thoughts after I got here was "hah, these are NAFTA barf bags," which is multiple levels of wrong. (Labeled in English, French, and Spanish. BTW French uses way too many words for "single-use only, which is *just* like them, so actually whatever.)
That was pretty awful but I didn't puke all over my clothes while being wheeled into the building, and actually kept it together enough to grab clean stuff before the ambulance arrived. Puking and severe dehydration: officially not compatible with walking.
Well, my rural sheriff has very clearly implemented a significant IT upgrade, because this time 911 resulted in a text request for location sharing (from them, not my phone's software). Also vomiting that lasts a week is my new least-favorite reason to be here, finally beating off chest pains.
True - I think they both fed on each other. Still, I may never be over the fact we've run the gamut of "the hot new guy is the face of youth" to "why are we electing septuagenarians" with presidents who are about a month apart in age. "Go away, Boomers" is like forty years of US politics now.
Anyway I'm pretty sure I was still seeing cigarette vending machines in 1993, and when I waitressed in the late 1990s and early 2000's, there was no physical barrier between the two sections - just a little sign. It was completely inescapable.
My grandma was on team "I'm an addict fully committed to ensuring NONE of my descendants are the least bit interested" and I know it bugged her how the smoke was everywhere in public except school and inside (some) churches and libraries. She never smoked near us but other smokers didn't care.
Anyway they were way, way, way too into him, kind of the way Teddy Roosevelt's supporters were way too into him. I was a kid in 1992 and kept thinking it was now well past weird, but then when I got to college (early) in 1997, it turned out my classmates were pretty much completely over him, yay.
There was a Boomer thing where they were super excited he was one of their own, because the previous 8 presidents had all been old enough to participate in WWII. From Eisenhower to Bush 1.0, the last birth year was 1924; his is 1946. That's why and how he deliberately played to the young.
Someone do a "it's raining shoes" video, please.
Because even the supposed good guys and self-proclaimed feminists and people you trust to listen will gleefully throw you under the bus, see. Under absolutely no circumstances will your situation or anybody else's be improved if you resist in any way, or even just disclose anything.
Very much a "don't threaten me with a good time" situation. The aggrieved teen dealing with too many despicable adult males in 1997-2000 would be throwing a party. Especially after the second workplace harassment situation, which involved telling myself there's no point whatsoever in objecting.
There's literally a parable *exactly* on point - and it shows up in three Gospels. Pretty sure I memorized the verses in Matthew, on top of the ungrateful lepers in Luke. Also had illustrations of both; it's all very dramatic.
Ugh, things I successfully repressed for literal decades. Of course these specific jerks would bring it to mind. (I didn't realize I was an actual kid at the time, someone must have had a poster in college or something because almost everything went over my head back then.)
Happy to off all the sick people, broadly construed, too.
That explanation beats "yeah, but the other guy is as complex as a piece of stone age flatbread", too. Only one of the parties has to be unusual enough in just the right way for this particular claim to be true, and just from serial killers we know there are plenty of sociopaths who'd do this, too.
Right, and that's true of most of them, but one of the two parties to the relevant correspondence is exactly the kind of man who would 1000% do this bizarre pretentious thing. "Generally speaking it's never that deep" can't beat "in this specific instance, with this specific guy, it's plausible."
That kind of person delights in verbal tricks with an intellectual vibe. An anagram of an obscure word, used to refer to something dirty, and the only people who have the explanation are an elite cadre of very special (and usually rich or at least powerful) boys, fits *perfectly*.
I'm pretty sure the people who actually believe in that one attribute it to Epstein, who was an intellectual show-off. Like he'd gather a group of really smart people and pretend he was just as knowledgeable as the top experts in the room, but upon any probing it was clear he had no clue.
It reminds me of promotional materials for a movie that came out quite a while ago - that image alone was enough to keep me from ever watching it.
I think they're trying to go for "signatures never vary", not recognizing that an actually-identical signature pretty much guarantees it's a forgery (by someone stupid). When I was a kid I tried to perfect my signature so it'd always look exactly the same, but then I learned about auto-pens.
One of the main benefits to (reasonable, non-punitive) regulation and taxation is the acceptance by all parties that "there are lines". You get kind of the same effect from formal unionization, but can't really get it from prohibitionist scolds. It's fundamentally the wrong sort of influence.
Which got some play with Reagan, but not like this, because he could play the reformed sinner. White evangelicals *love* "yeah, I did terrible things thirty years ago, but then I accepted Jesus" and unlike Trump he wasn't openly, aggressively contemptuous towards everything sacred or righteous.
Somewhat bizarrely I both am and am not, because the Reagan exception predates my birth but it was still an impediment locally until like 2018. In fact, politicians here are still really, really careful, and the Trump exception is more "God sometimes makes use of terrible people for holy purposes."
Like, the list of countries I will listen to about America being overly prudish is fairly long, but France, specifically, is permanently disqualified. Not sure if it was the interminable debate about having an age of consent *at all* it was that did it for me, or a specific case, but anyway: no.
Yeah, but also when a man in France drugs his wife and invites about a hundred strangers to rape her, apparently the only way to get the population at large legitimately outraged is a horrifically explicit open trial where the victim pretty much throws her right to privacy on a funeral pyre, so.
And proving you have a "big, beautiful brain" while also being gross is right up Trump's alley, even if he's not actually smart enough to come up with this method. He'd love to participate, and probably convince himself it was really his idea. Their personality disorders were, sadly, compatible.
He isn't, but Epstein was the kind of smart person who delighted in "cleverness" like anagrams instead of just random words to replace bawdy terms (which is normal amongst pedophile groups). It was a way to show off his brain on top of a way to mark an elite in-crowd.
Anyway the fact it's been closed has made me sad each time I've come home since they closed it, so yay.
One of my *absolute* favorite places when I was small. The carousel and the blown plastic animal machine right next to it (as judged by a five-year-old's not necessarily linear reckoning). Liked it even better than the little train. (Griffith Park was within walking distance of my dad's house.)
It's also *super* easy to scratch yourself into a rash due to anxiety-induced itching. In my experience you often don't realize you're doing it until the rash is extensive, at which point you're pretty sure you're scratching because of the rash! (My primary anxiety med is an antihistamine.)
She is a paralegal who entered the profession because she was a legendary Twitter poster who was wildly good at legal research and posting despite having no formal training. Suffice to say "ruthless" and "brings all the receipts, and yes I do mean all of them" both feel insufficient.
Good chance they were sweeter, too. Or completely awful because of poor food storage practices or growing it in a dumb place or whatever, but smaller is often correlated with tastier.
In September there are basically no salt trucks, because those vehicles are either in storage or being used for something else.
My dad's ancestors were primarily extremely helpful people who had exactly two modes (600 years in one place, moved to urban America c. 1900) and my mom's at least the third generation in her own maternal line who did genealogy as a hobby, so we mainly did genetic testing to see if it was right.
They're pretty good for broad strokes, and with legitimately isolated communities - like, I have a crapton of documentation showing two great-grandparents came from the Ashkenazi community in central Lithuania and my Ashkenazi percentage is always just a bit shy of 25%.
Wait, the entrance exams that completely take over kids' lives and make the stock markets open late and everything? I'd be desperate for a chance to switch countries just to avoid that insanity myself, but losing three years sounds incredibly counterproductive if you're going to be there again.
(Trying to catch up and overtake America on food production was Khrushchev's white whale. Having to buy grain from the US was a major factor in his eventual removal from office and the USSR's weakness on consumer goods was a big factor in the collapse, so the obsession wasn't wholly unjustifiable.)
Khrushchev was pretty clearly confused/alarmed by his own visit to an American supermarket thirty years earlier, and I know Tito did in fact have a happy face, he just looked determined not to give in when he visited a US grocery exhibit two years earlier. Old-school diplomacy in the house!
![[Josip] Tito (authoritarian leader of Yugoslavia who played the Americans and Soviets off each other remarkably well) looking kind of constipated on his tour of an American supermarket exhibit at an international trade fair in 1957. On the left, the official who's explaining something to a member of the delegation looks thrilled, and on the right, most of the delegation is doing a much better job of looking cheerful but not too happy. They're next to a packaged goods aisle and you can just see the feet of onlookers (journalists, etc.) on the second level of the exhibit.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qtuj4appzq44yyelta6x7roo/bafkreicnkqesvca5xlwyjhitbu3n4aa75e6ndhasgjlofiwkptaclhgsoq@jpeg "Click to view full size")
(The only reason that AP class existed was that she, personally, was going nuts at the way the needs of motivated/capable kids were not being met in any way; in retrospect I'm surprised she didn't pull the trigger on leaving much sooner. My own mom homeschooled us for academic reasons.)
The age distribution of the kids was weird - I think the oldest ones must have stayed at home or gone to an international school in Cleveland or something. Which is totally rational, I mean the only AP teacher at the high school (English) insisted her family relocate when their eldest hit 13.
(Suffice to say the impact of having a couple of Japanese-speaking kids in the schools received outsized attention for a town that still had living residents whose degrees from the public high school were earned in German. Not, like, many, by then, but still enough to outnumber those kids!)
Years and years ago IIRC Honda built a factory in the dinky middle-of-nowhere rural town we lived in. The ratio of foreign nationals to local employees was like 50:1, then like 15:100 once it was operational, and eventually like 10:350 once they were meeting various production/quality standards.
Working while actually on a tourist visa is just plain illegal, but there's a bunch of nonimmigrant visas with weird duration limits and whatnot. "Randomly hiring some foreigners to do some stuff here but just for a while because the authorities are uptight" is an insanely old and common situation.
Remember having extremely disparaging thoughts about this "genre" in my first college literature class. Part of me wants to call it "Oscar bait, but for books" except we have actual awards for books.
My parents are fifty/fifty on whether the first or second shot was worse; it seems like it's dependent on the person. (The bio pair hasn't agreed on anything since 1982 but I made sure not to prime them on the question, and the steps, who had no quarrel AFAIK, split the same way.)
My mom got mild shingles a couple of years after vaccination and was like "I'm so glad I went through the vaccine agony because *that* was torture". She knew my stepdad's full-blown shingles was a nightmare, but also she didn't *really* know until she got the baby version. It was theoretical.
It was primarily Chicago, with an eventual side trip to current COVID-19 infection rates. Now we're describing how much we want RFK Jr. to suffer from preventable infections.
TFW your parent sends you a vaguely apocalyptic text message and you have to guess which headline he's referring to.
Obviously power/reputation imbalances are a thing con staff are very, very used to, but I still pity the fan theoretically in charge of a conversation between the man who personally coined the term "sci-fi" (and also kind of invented cosplay) and Mr. "Fahrenheit 451" himself.
Reminds me of the look on the staff guy's face for the Ray Bradbury/Forrest J. Ackerman "panel" I went to. They were scheduled counter to something big, like a new SMG project or the Matrix sequels, so it was shockingly intimate, and those guys had been doing their thing at cons since cons existed.
They killed everything on six continents and 99.9% of the life in Asia in "2012", executing the proto-stepdad for the crime of being a better partner for the protagonist's ex (and better parent to his kids), but as soon as the prizefight sequence began you *knew* Caesar's survival was guaranteed.
Specifically the place where if you don't make it explicitly clear the dog makes it, you're straight up invoking the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing. Audiences will eat you alive for it, whereas if the named dog lives they're OK with a canon human death toll measured in the billions.
"Independence Day" came out when I was a teenager so I obviously rolled my eyes extremely hard at Boomer outrunning a giant ball of all-consuming fire (my dad still occasionally reminds us that this sequence breaks the laws of physics and the effect looked cheap even then) but it came from a place.
Like seriously, periodontal disease is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality; if you lose a tooth you're more likely to suffer from CHF, stroke, or heart attack, or die from anything, even after correcting for socioeconomic status and whatnot.
The vision thing is irritating to me because my own prescription is nearly -10 diopters and whatnot, but from a public health perspective siloing dental care is just objectively nuts. I mean, jockeys and farmers and breeders don't obsess over horses' teeth for the fun of it; it's vital information.
Or World War II, apparently. There are at least a handful of "Best Picture" winners and nominees that are specifically on point, too, including one that's just barely two years old.
Also turns out that I already had CHiPs in autocorrect (!), so the freeway nerd population presumably includes either me or the Gboard team. Or both.
My dad mostly only let me watch reruns, and he's a freeway nerd, so I've definitely seen CHiPs. 50/50 odds if he mentions it again for the first time (on any given visit) when we drive along the 710 or the 210; that basically depends on how early in the trip we go visit family in Fresno.
I'm a 1980s LA kid, my mom and dad and stepparents are 1950s kids, but my paternal half-siblings are 1990s kids. My mom watches current shows set in Los Angeles and is like "have these writers even been to LA, you can't see the mountains from there"; the kids do the exact opposite with old shows.
Anyway, most adults in the 1960s lived though the Depression and a whole lot of them were old enough to remember when diabetes was a death sentence and major public health problems included completely unregulated food/drug production, horse manure everywhere, and *doctors* not believing in germs.
Not to mention the way that Grandpa got his high school degree at the same time my dad did (1972), owing to the fact that he had to drop out of school when two of his three older brothers died of what are now preventable illnesses. The baby died of one a couple of years earlier - 50% of the kids.
My grandparents were middle-aged in 1965; their youngest son was 11 and already taller than both of them. Actually all of their descendants were taller than their peak heights before high school except me; I'm about half an inch shy of Grandpa, but my "little" brother has like eight inches on me.
Also presented a rather impressive tripping hazard, though it was perhaps more accurately characterized as a garotting hazard, because each bedroom only had one gas lamp, and it was right next to the doors. (Phone line went with the electric; coax was exposed in lieu of tunneling through plaster.)
When I was a teen we moved into a house built before wiring for electricity was standard, and the 1920s owners elected to run the wires through the existing gas lines (which were mostly for lighting). Turns out having all your plugs at table or eye-height is actually super inconvenient!
(AKA "why Daddy will never, ever find a reason good enough to enter the state of Missouri again". I keep having to convince myself not to tell him how many other places are so totally at *least* that bad sometimes.)
On the other hand, speaking from both first and second-hand experience, it takes only minimum doses of properly miserable weather to make even that feel pretty darned awesome in Los Angeles. My dad coming to Ohio in summer once in a decade, for example. Or his single childhood visit to St. Louis.
I'm a sorta-Ohioan (my origin and heart are in Los Angeles but most of my college transcripts and work/rental history are here) and this man really wants me to emphasize all the other not-Ohio places I can also lay some degree of claim to.
Thank you (really) - I'm under the impression that Americans in general completely miss social class stuff a lot but I personally do it constantly no matter how much I read on the subject. Lots of articles in the BBC give me at best a vague sense of "class probably has something to do with this".
Like "hey, any way you do this is by definition nuts, and it *all* looks stupid if you actually stop to think about it, so there's no reason to feel bad about accidentally picking a different flavor of wrong as a kid."
Don't remember the author but pretty sure that framework's in one of my earliest exposures to the issue - the "series of falls" thing, I mean. I remember looking at slow motion videos of walking and running and being like "you know, he's not wrong". Made me feel better about being a toe-walker.
Here's a more, like, professional take on the problem. (Nobody was being neglectful about my vision, it was just the 1980s and I was a physically clumsy early reader.)
They do a ton of pediatric stuff there, there's a whole line of optometry instruments and products for kids way too young to communicate, let alone read. Makes me jealous; I was in third grade before I got referred for sneaking up to the blackboard and copying everything onto paper.
My opthalmologist has a machine that gets to within like half a diopter without the technician even doing anything, as far as I can tell. Spits out an estimate on a little receipt. You just have to try to focus on the little picture, which IIRC is a barn or farmhouse on a grassy field. Colorful.
Technically I can only find other on Wikipedia at midnight but I could have sworn there were others - that's just the two guys most likely to end up as a "Jeopardy!" question for this specific reason.
And if I remember right he had... four? bestsellers by then. And was positioned as a ridiculously wonky writer within the genre from the very beginning. I mean he was first published by the Naval Institute, for crying out loud. Not the only thriller writer to do that, but also not normal.